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“But Professional Actors Aren’t Sexually Affected”

* CONTENT ADVISORY: The specificity this topic requires may be
inappropriate for some readers. I will quote from (and
cite) a couple articles that, due to their explicit nature, I would not
recommend visiting.*

While on the set of an independent
film, I overheard one of the actresses talk about a sex scene she had done in a
theatrical production. Based on her limited understanding of male anatomy, it
was obvious she wasn’t a girl given to immorality in her everyday life. In
fact, she might have even considered herself a Christian (I saw her reading a
copy of Left Behind during a lunch break).
Whatever the case, the way she described the sex scene made it obvious that her
male co-star was sexually aroused by the experience—something he
apologized to her for.

Now, I’ve heard it argued that simulated
sex scenes in works of art (as opposed to real sex scenes in porn) are devoid
of any sense of eros. They’re all
business and no pleasure, so to speak. So was the story I heard just an
isolated incident?

Hardly. The article ‘My mum’s going to see this’: Actors and
actresses reveal secrets of the sex scenes attempts to explore what goes on
during the filming of a sex scene “when titillation is not the primary ambition.” [1]

Although all the actors interviewed [for this
article] claimed sex scenes were unerotic to film, apocryphal tales of male actors
who can’t hide their arousal are as old as cinema. . . . Adds [actress Chloë]
Sevigny: “There’s the famous cliché where the boys say, ‘Excuse me if I get
hard... [and] excuse me if I don’t.’”

The article continues a little
later:

[T]hespian lore is full of tales of actors
getting carried away while simulating sex, and also of actors suddenly wishing
that the love-making was for real. “Sidney Lumet says in his book on directing
that when actors fall for each other it will either be in the rehearsal or the
shooting of the love scene,” says [actress Natalie] Dormer.

A perusal through the article
reveals that emotions and/or hormones can run high during these scenes, often
in negative ways—especially for the women (an issue we’ve dealt with before and will revisit sometime
in the future). Sexual arousal can be a very present hindrance in times of
filming (so to speak). Not only that, but the filming of a sex scene can lead
actors to generate emotional attachments to the point of actually falling in
love.

As noted above, men are more
susceptible to sexual arousal during sex scenes. Actress Maria Di Angelis concurs:

You have to have a sense of humor about filming
these scenes. But the men, especially, have to keep themselves in check. [2]

What do men in particular need to
keep in check? The answer is obvious: their libido. This makes sense, seeing as
how men are generally more visually oriented then women. And since they also
generally tend to treat sex more impersonally, they can more easily get
hormonally involved without there being any real relationship between them and
their female counterparts.

Maria Di Angelis was involved in
the orgy scene in The Wolf of Wall Street. Considering that Martin Scorsese was at the helm, she figured this was as good
a time as any to do a nude scene. After the shoot, she overheard two male
actors talking about her part in the scene:

“I couldn’t help but get an erection,” one of them
said. “It was so hot.”

(When the men realized she had
heard them talking about her, they quickly apologized.)

Of course, it’s not always just men who struggle on set. One
lady who pretended to have sex with Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street (in the same scene as above) kept acting
like it was real. Angelis, who was present for the incident, said, “She was very—how
can I say?—enthusiastic. It wasn’t acting.”

So we see that men (primarily) and women (occasionally) can’t just turn
off their sexuality when participating in sexually explicit scenarios. It would
seem the human psyche short circuits when attempting to separate sexual actions
from sexual feelings.

Notice also how the men in the above scenarios acted when they were “caught” responding to their co-stars sexually: they apologized. They were aware that a line of indecency had been crossed, and the instinctual response was to say, “I’m sorry.”

But there’s another problem with
saying sex scenes aren’t arousing for actors. It’s found in a short snippet
from the article we first looked at:

…films where the actors have real, as opposed to
simulated sex, are becoming more common.

You can’t say actors are uninvolved sexually/hormonally if they
are actually having intercourse for the camera. In fact, there’s a word for that:
pornography.

Sexual arousal = lust?

In their book Every Man’s Battle, Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker define
sexual purity this way: it is “receiving no sexual gratification from anything
or anyone outside of your husband or wife.” The book itself is problematic (I can’t
wholeheartedly recommend it), but I think this definition is helpful in its
specificity.

In light of such a definition, it
is problematic for you as an actor—especially if you’re a man—to agree to star
in a film that will require simulated sex. Your subsequent sexual arousal
cannot be labeled as a merely innocent biological reaction.

Having said that, let me reiterate
something I said last week:sexual
arousal is not synonymous with lust. If you’re shopping for groceries, a
scantily clad woman struts by, and you find yourself sexually aroused, that in
and of itself is not a sin. It is an opportunity
to sin, but it is, at that moment, a temptation only. (I know it’s easy in our
minds to equate temptation with sin, but the two are far from equal.)

What Scripture forbids is actively giving ourselves an opportunity to sin: “make no provision for the
flesh” (Rom. 13:14); “do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh” (Gal.
5:13). If you purposefully put yourself in harm’s way, you are being foolish at
best and downright sinful at worst. Praying “lead me not into temptation” while
willingly putting yourself on the path of temptation is an exercise in
futility.

My main point is simply that sex
scenes in movies can be, and often are, sexually arousing to actors. We must
not pretend otherwise—especially when considering how to best show Christian love to the actors whom we pay to entertain us.

Comments

While on the set of an independent film, I overheard one of the actresses talk about a sex scene she had done in a theatrical production. Based on her limited understanding of male anatomy, it was obvious she wasn’t a girl given to immorality in her everyday life. In fact, she might have even considered herself a Christian (I saw her reading a copy of Left Behind during a lunch break).

[This obligatory comment is designed to make Facebook recognize my article’s content. Thanks for your understanding.]

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Your argument robs adult women of
agency because it says outright that they
are not consenting and implies they
cannot consent. It infantilizes adult women and asserts that they can only
be protected by men with a white knight impulse. We’re getting into an area
where women are regarded as little more than sheep, being led by whatever crook
is nearest.
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pressure on actors to perform nude and/or sex scenes for audiences. It’s a
problem that is at once both tacitly acknowledged and blithely ignored. I have
argued further that those who suffer most under this burden are actresses.
With my emphasis on women, some readers have responded with
major concerns. I am both thankful for and alarmed by this feedback, because
the quoted critique above is not what I have meant to communicate. Not at all. I
offered a …

Let me tell you about a film that’s garnered a lot of
publicity. The story revolves around a wealthy and debonair businessman with
serious control issues. His sexual tastes involve perverse fantasies, but he
gets what he wants because he’s rich, powerful, and handsome. In telling this
story, the movie doesn’t shy away from depictions of the sex act. The audience
is inundated with sex, in fact. The debauchery is enough to make a lot of
people sick, either with revulsion, pleasure, or a mixture of both.

Do you think I’m talking about Fifty Shades of Grey? Actually, I’m referring to The Wolf of Wall Street, which came out on
DVD just last year.
Many prominent Christian critics loved WoWS, as I pointed out earlier. Fifty Shades of Grey,
on the other hand, has been either ignored or condemned. And yet there are some
glaring similarities in how both movies handle sex.
They both employ stylistic techniques that were labeled as hardcore porn just a few decades
ago. These techniques involve …